Flux Leadership: Real-Time Inquiry for Humanizing Educational Change

Product Description
In these times of rapid change, including a global pandemic, educational leaders need tools and frameworks that can adapt to evolving shifts in real time. What might happen if a leadership framework could make sense of this complexity in ways that are humane, ethical, culturally responsive, and multifaceted? This book examines how a flux leadership mindset and corresponding tools promote the conditions for educational change that uplift stakeholders and generate contextualized data during emergency situations. The educational leaders at the heart of this book employed a flux leadership tool through a process called “rapid-cycle inquiry,” which allows for collaborative inquiries to take place in real time to answer tough questions and surface stories that are often silenced in times of sudden change. Featuring narratives of what happened to schools during COVID-19, Flux Leadership introduces a generative framework for agile, responsive, anti-racist, trauma-informed, healing-centered leadership for times of crisis and beyond.
Book Features:
Provides a framework and set of real-time strategies for leaders to engage in critical leadership practice and crisis leadership with attention to equity.
Addresses vital school and district-based leadership issues in various contexts, including reflexivity, identity, positionality, racial literacy, brave space leadership, equity-focused professional development, and critical collaboration.
Covers a range of vantage points and intersectional social identities in succinct, accessible, and pragmatic ways.
Creates a new approach for leaders to get at context and drive homegrown metrics that speak back to and challenge top-down metrics in schools and districts.
Review
“A flux leadership approach, as you’ll see throughout every chapter of this groundbreaking, practitioner-focused book, surfaces real-time, actionable lessons for leaders as we serve children and families in these times…Keep your pen and journal nearby as you turn these pages. Let this text be a source of resonance, dynamic reflection, and an active site of inquiry within and for your practice and leader healing.”―From the Foreword by Christina M. Grant, state superintendent of education, Washington, D.C.
“For too long, educational leadership has been about the management of all things: the management of learning, of teachers, of students, and even the management of equity. Flux Leadership is a book that changes that. By situating student and community voices at the center of educational leadership and reform, this book offers up a humanizing path forward for school leaders. It is a roadmap for not only equity but also humanization. It offers powerful anecdotes and data sets that demonstrate not only that humanization is possible, but that it is often most possible during times of flux. Leaders, students, practitioners, community folks, and anyone else connected to schools must read this book!”―Muhammad Khalifa, professor, The Ohio State University
About the Author
Sharon M. Ravitch is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education where she teaches courses on leadership, applied research, and racial literacy. Chloe Alexandra Kannan, former middle-grades language arts teacher, is a doctoral candidate in the Literacy, Culture, and International Education Division of Penn GSE.